There's Trouble Right Here In The River City

What better way to start the workweek than with this sentence, taken from the home page of the National Hurricane Center's Web site: "There are no tropical cyclones at this time."

Finally.

It may be calm in the tropics but conditions are turbulent in DeBary even as floodwaters from a trio of hurricanes gradually recede.

The River City is troubled. Seems nearly everyone with water problems feels neglected by their 10-year-old city government.

Take Dan Feller. He lives on Wisteria Drive in one of DeBary's established neighborhoods off U.S. Highway 17-92. His 33-year-old, 1,400-square-foot home is sandwiched between lakes Anna Maria and Maud, both of which have spilled over their banks and threaten to enter his home on two fronts.

Feller is a patient man but last week he could not understand why, with lake water just inches from his house, the city was pumping water into big tankers to clear the flooded entrance to DeBary Golf & Country Club.

He thinks class -- not need -- was the driving force behind the city's response.

"But I guess there are enough people there who can raise a stink, and I guess their tax base is a little higher," said Feller, 43.

As for his neighborhood, Feller said, "The city doesn't look at these homes as that important."

Not very far away, Pat McGrath lives at that flooded entrance to DeBary Golf & Country Club. Every time a vehicle braved the water it would send a wake onto the lawn of her 11-year-old, 2,200-square-foot home.

"We are being completely ignored. It's like we don't exist," McGrath said. "We pay taxes like everyone else. We have $250,000 houses here."

McGrath, 75, cannot bear to go outside because of the mosquitoes and the standing water. To get out of her neighborhood she has to use a makeshift road that used to be a sidewalk.

Enough is enough. McGrath is trying to sell her home and get out of DeBary.

Feller and McGrath are not alone in their discontent.

Others have wondered why water pumps were dispatched to certain locations and not others. Conspiracy theorists suggest that City Council members used their influence to get favored parts of DeBary pumped.

There is a widespread belief that the city did not take its flooding problem seriously until the country club neighborhoods got into trouble.

A couple in the Springview subdivision, where tankers are transferring water from flooded areas into dry retention ponds, even complained that the tankers made it difficult to get in and out of their neighborhood.

And what crisis would be complete without threats of lawsuits against developers and the city and anyone else who happens to be standing within subpoena distance?

DeBary has seen a lot of selfless acts in its hour of need. Strangers have shown up in flooded areas to haul sandbags and save furniture. Workers from neighboring cities were dispatched to help.

But the flood of 2004 also revealed deep dissatisfaction in this young city, where these days unity can be found in residents' discontent.